


The Powers of Two

by Aragonitemoved



Category: Doctor Who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 00:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19415077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aragonitemoved/pseuds/Aragonitemoved
Summary: He was erased from his own memories, and what little he does remember is confusing and contrary. And yet he shaped them all into the versions of himself that survive to this day. A closer look at The Second Doctor, and how very vital he was and will be to them all...even if they can't remember him.





	1. Chapter 1

Title: The Powers of Two  
Category: TV Shows » Doctor Who  
Author: aragonitemoved  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: K+  
Genre: Mystery/Angst  
Published: 06-17-13, Updated: 07-04-14  
Chapters: 14, Words: 78,307

Chapter 1: One: The Season's End

ONE: THE TIME IS RIPE.

He couldn't regret a thing.

His first body.

Of course he would be a little nostalgic about it; one never forgot their very first life. But he'd known this moment would arrive sooner or later—sooner thanks to the succession of opponents that kept erupting in their lives. If he had time to be honest with himself, it was a large reason for leaving Susan behind. Her memories were still so vulnerable, and any threat of renewal might re-crush her fragile improvements. No; renewal would remind her of their shared tragedy. He couldn't change with her so close to him. They had to part ways, and he did so as soon as he was satisfied she would be well cared for. That young human was ready to die for her if need be, and of all his criteria that was the most important of them all.

It was only a matter of time. He felt it long before the last nonsense with the Daleks. They'd only pushed things along, instigated the inevitable earlier than he'd expected. The season had been harsh in the end, but it did end, and in a (beg the pardon), timely manner.

He had a slight but uneasy suspicion, a prickle of his long-lost prescience, that Daleks might cause him trouble of this nature in the future. Cybermen…what about the Cybermen? Why were they so important, these odd, terrible miscarries of the mind and body?

At the end of it, he was ready to go, to pass on, to deal with this worn out body. His friends were clustered about, fluttering with questions that he couldn't answer yet. So tired...there was nothing to worry about, not really. The Cybermen have lost, but his price was here. Best to go through this now, in the company of these quaint little humans. The sounds of the TARDIS vibrated into his bones as he stretched out upon the floor. His chest quieted, matching her tempo. He'd heard of this phenomenon, but never had chance to personally witness it, even among his own people. When a TARDIS bonded with her (for female was the default pronoun) Time Lord, they shared in the change together. Fitting, that the TARDIS, which he owed do much to, would stand as his own kin at the end, be his own kin.

He was sorry Susan wasn't with him, but she was with humans of her own now. They'd thrown their lot in with humanity, the two of them. What had been desperation and fugitive cunning had become something much more. Humans were primitive, brash, and fatally uneducated, blind to the Universe and equal parts ignorance and arrogance...all the reasons that would keep any self-respecting Time Lord milliparsecs away—they didn't even visit it save to demonstrate its smallness, the hopeless limitations of its many species, and to compare themselves in icy Gallifreyan superiority.

If they used Humans for anything resembling a positive light, it would be to show the Universe that the Time Lords had been perfection upon the first, and the Humans, who resembled them physically in all ways, was the cheap imitation, a Cosmic Joke.

Earth was the last place they'd ever look for him—and better yet, the last place they'd look for Susan. He'd hidden her in plain sight. Even if they found him, they'd never dream he would have put his own precious granddaughter in the same screeching backwater world of primates.

Oh, but that was the trouble with primates, you know. They either slid downward, or they slid upward. But they never stayed the same, and he knew that Susan's instincts were to be trusted. These folks were on their way up.

The Change was coming.

He could feel it; a sleepy lassitude slipping cell by cell through his body, surges that followed the pulse of the TARDIS. No pain; it was too advanced for that. An early Change was agony, he remembered being told. The lack of discomfort assured him that this was perfect timing. His eyes closed, and the floor felt soft, soothing,. He could hear over his twice-timed beating of the blood and that of the TARDIS (double heart? triple heart now?) they were turning him over, crying out, worried. They were a constant trial with their inquisitiveness and challenges to his clearly superior intellect and they never accepted that he didn't have to answer their questions. Despite it all, they were dear things, more flexible than Time Lords. Susan had once told him, they may be stuck with one heart each, but they beat for the right reasons.

It was all worth it in the end. He'd tried so hard to do the right thing with his life. He'd done all that was expected of him after his brash youth before his family suffered further from his actions; he'd settled down and accepted the duties of his Family. But when little Susan came into his life he knew the troubles of his youth had only simmered; they were now boiling.

Susan was too much like him. She asked questions where were no answers, and Time Lords never forgot nor forgave such atrocities.

It had come down to the choice that was no choice. Stay and watch them break her the way they had broken him, or free her, even if it meant putting them both in danger.

It was more dangerous to keep her on Gallifrey. They would shatter her even harder than they'd broken him. How could he watch that young, fresh face full of wonder and joy crumple up with age-old horrors? How could he watch her age centuries overnight with one glimpse into the Forever, or run mad? She wasn't ready for the Glimpse. They had hurt her badly enough! It could take centuries and perhaps more than one body, for her to finish healing. From a bright, bold, eager and curious little girl to a fearful, timid and wounded thing. Oh, his people had everything to answer for!

But Time Laws made no allowances for the preparedness of the Novice. She had already caused trouble with her questions, and her beautiful toys, self-built, childish and lovely things, were considered dangerous hearsay for what they represented.

Time Lords did not "play." They were not frivolous. They were Time Lords.

Go mad; be inspired; run away. Those were the three choices. But there was a fourth choice...one he could make before she took her Turn upon that gauntlet of legalized madness.

He was inspired to run away.

Sometimes he wondered what his few remaining friends thought when their escape made all the news. It wasn't as though he had associated with the best examples of their race… Of course he would steal not just any TARDIS. It would have to be one of those aggravating, obsolete Type 40's. Too much personality embedded into the electrical brains of the antiques; over an extended use they had an alarming tendency to develop intelligence of their own, and bonded deeply with their Gallefreyan pilot. They had been out of favor for millennia, thrown aside for the newer, cleaner, brighter things that had data but no intelligence; extrapolation programs but no un-prediction; attention to detail but no joy of random happenstance or spontaneity and they never, ever went where they were not ordered.

Really, if one is fleeing from Gallifreyans, it only makes sense to use their most embarrassing achievements against them. Gallifreyans weren't prophets, but they could calculate probabilities with their multi-temporal views of time. This battered old Type 40 would make them even harder to catch.

The fact that his first TARDIS ride had been in a Type 40 was just a coincidence.

The roar in his ears, his hearts, the blood in his brain, the drum under his skin...their voices blended with the Tidal Time; the lindos organ was blooming within his chest, opening like a flower, sending its messages to every part of his ancient body.

And he did feel ancient. Quite ancient, and ephemeral as the sands that blew about the base of the pyramids, or the temporal grains floating about the Rock of Eternity. He was changing, and hard though it was, he concentrated on what he needed to become...someone younger, definitely. He needed a stronger body for all this gadding about. He didn't plan on running into Daleks or dropping into a Cybernest; he was quite content to hide in the mists of Earth History and never, ever, go further than a few hundred years past the 20th century.

He didn't plan on it, but common sense dictated something like this would happen again, and it would fare worse for him if he wasn't prepared.

So he thought of what he wanted to be, guiding the lindos nectar into his own re-shaping.

Younger.

Stronger.

Agile.

He needed a body as clever as his mind—his old body simply couldn't keep up with his mental perambulations.

Size didn't concern him; cleverness did. A large body could cause more troubles than it was worth in his experience, but he left that open...let the lindos do its work without much direction (he was too inexperienced, for it was his first regeneration after all, to know that his brief mental side-trip was enough to send the lindos into making a considerably smaller body).

He was almost ready. Seconds had passed, his hearts blending with the grinding wheeze of the TARDIS. The sound helped him concentrate, took away any residual discomfort from the act of Changing on a cellular level. He wondered if the TARDIS was changing with him. No matter. It was witnessing his new future.

A flicker of mental wildfire: the lindos was in his brain now, repairing age-damaged neural synapses. He was a little indignant; when had they become so damaged? And he hadn't known? Most unfair!

Almost...almost complete...the TARDIS was grinding to a halt in his mind and body; marking the closure of the Change. He would temporarily lose consciousness, and then wake up, not unlike a rebooted computer, and he would start anew.

The last thought slipping across his mind, influencing the lindos, was a wistful hope of his subconscious.

It was the wish that he'd fled Gallifrey long ago.

When he was still young enough to have some fun.


	2. Chapter 2

THREE: IMPATIENS

Three loves his first self and hates his former self.

It shows in his temper, which is thankfully mellower than his first self, but at times he thinks his humour has never been more cutting and cruel.

He's more physically aggressive, and all the Venusian Akido and karate in the Galaxies can't change the fact that he's at his calmest when he's physically in combat of some sort. He compromises in a way. He uses the Akido more, for it protects himself and his attacker from injury. When the situation calls for it he slips to the more direct karate-but even when he's in the heart of a fight, there's a tiny grain of a voice in his brain, wishing there was another way, with even less violence. He trusts that voice even though he doesn't ask himself who it is from: violence is easy to dispense and often impossible to reverse.

He remembers almost nothing of the Time Lord he used to be. He remembers everything about being One, but Two? Two seems to be...gone. He has the data of the past in his head; cool facts and figures but that's mostly all it is, and that's when those facts and figures aren't contradicting each other. The emotional colors and multi-dimensional bits that differentiate a fact from a memory are simply not there.

His brain is damaged. The part of his self that was Two is not really in the data or the facts or the bits and pieces in his brain.

Two is missing.

It's Two's fault he's here, trapped on this planet.

Good riddance, he says of himself angrily, and he says it a great deal when he's feeling sorry for himself.

The Council forced him into changing; he vaguely remembered they wouldn't even let him choose his own face! All choices taken from him, all the things that made him, HIM.

He tried very hard not to think of Jamie and Zoe, but there were little pieces of them all over the TARDIS and to avoid them he had to all but live in the Console Room. He'd scrapped the clock and chair into the deepest, darkest dimensional closet within range. Out with the old, in with the new.

But the memories still burned, artronic ghosts and whispers that reminded him that there was a bit of bravado in his demeanor and he hoped no one ever saw it.

They were little more than fragments, overwhelmed by an unbelievable pain—oh, Rassilon, the pain! He shied from that memory at every chance—he couldn't hold on to any of his recollections of the Trial—it all turned into the memory of the pain, of the lindos flooding his system, unnaturally active, forcibly bursting open with all the finesse of a knife into a seed, or the touch of one of those Earth flowers, the Impatiens species...swelling and ripening and bursting open when it was ripe at the lightest touch.

Only if one was too rough with the tender seed-pod, it opened anyway, the plant's autonomics overwhelmed. A seed too green to nurture its own life would be catapulted into its new universe, miscarried into being.

He was an Impatiens...forced out of his natural life...and catapulted into a primitive world such as this (nice to visit, horrible to live in), without the freedom to grow for himself.

It had been unnatural and infinitely, intimately obscene. Lindos was the saviour of the Time Lords. It was the bridge between a used up, damaged body into a new, healthy and vibrant life. Life! It was the blessed chance to start over, fresh to correct old mistakes and make new discoveries, gain more learning and wisdom.

A Time Lord was not designed to regenerate from one healthy, active body into another. Lindos flooded a weakened body, strengthened it and re-wired it; knitted bones together, spun nerve cells and honeycombed the chambers of the brain with the nutrients and trace elements vital to perform the miracle of new life. It also soothed the inevitably traumatized brain and softened the harshness of the experience, let most Time Lords sleep through one life into the next.

Lindos did not save his body. Lindos attacked it. It rampaged him like a firestorm in space, overwhelmed him, flooded his brain with fire and vertigo and his body knew it was not time; knew it was up against something as unnatural as a virus or germ or weapon, and met the attack of lindos with head-on resistance.

Oh, Rassilon. The memory of it.

If only the Change had just been pain. He could have borne that.

But they had watched.

He remembered the weight of their eyes as his cells burst and knitted; he knew the feel of other minds observing and the overwhelming emotion was that of satisfaction at his descent. They were changing him with their combined focus of will. Helpless under the ferocity of the lindos and the combined weight of much-older and experienced minds, he could only scrabble for some scrap of control through the ordeal that compressed Time to the point where a thousand years passed in seconds and fire warred with ice in his veins.

He intuitively sensed they had planned to shape him to their tastes all the way. It would make sense...and also explain that of all his emotions recalled of the Trial, a core of mindless rage burned like lava through the indescribable Pain.

If they'd planned to change him, to...to tame him, they'd been too hasty. That rage (an unseemly emotion for a Gallifreyan) had shaped him, beaten them to their horrid plans.

They hadn't liked his fondness for Earth and they thought he would grow heartily sick of it once he had to live there. True enough, but they were also worried about his meddling so they gave him tasks. The indignity of it all, but he wouldn't break under their sentencing. To break meant going back to Gallifrey, head down and pride humbled. Their proper and obedient little Time Lord at last.

Even his choice of clothing had displeased them—not even clad like a decent Time Lord! His robes of office bespoke an honor of his race, one that he should have acknowledged as a superior being. They didn't know about organ grinders or their monkeys, but their reaction to his fondness for the comfortable human clothing would have drawn parallels.

Dress should be appropriate to one's station.

He'd picked up that stray thought from one of his Shapers, worse luck. Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans, correct? He would continue to dress like a Human, and he would enjoy it. He took rather a grim delight in his wardrobe now. If he was an exiled and ersatz, honorary Earther, why not use the best Earth could offer? The elegance of the Victorian-Edwardian styles appealed to him, and frankly, suited his much-larger body.

One's conduct should be appropriate to one's composure. Always be unhurried, calm, and unrushed. Haste is imprudence. Haste is for lessor beings, and precisely why they wage in futile battles.

He was less panicky than he used to be, but he could move just as fast. His larger body fooled them into thinking him clumsy or slow. It was an advantage. They didn't think he was a fool any more. He was tired of being seen as a fool. Let them underestimate him in other ways. He was to be respected. His courtesy was a show of his strength, not timidity or a humbleness he didn't possess. He was going to meet all species head-on, with equal respect and get it in return.

He enjoyed the astonishment on the faces of those who fought him and lost, loved the shocked awareness come over their eyes—human, alien, android alike.

One good thing about being bigger.

He could fight.

And it felt good.

One's appearance should be restrained in every way. A Time Lord has complete control of his body and he should never forget this fact. There should be no impression of intemperance or frivolity in one's personal grooming.

Odd thing about his hair...

Sometimes his mirror would give him a startlement. He'd be grooming himself out for the morning, and something about the sensation of the comb's teeth or the sliding sensation would inadvertently transport him to a previous time...where his hair had been the black of India Ink, not the white of Guernsey Cream. The hairs would be heavy and smooth and glossy, not like this spun floss. He quite liked its color—the opposite of his former cut, it was dignified and a pleasant shade of white; it worked at various lengths and he never had to worry about wardrobe colors and patterns. But there was a slight wildness that was uncontrollable and that it reminded him his hair might be the only thing even he couldn't really control...

Sometimes he pulled his comb back, intending to tame a cowlick before remembering, you don't have a cowlick. And then that thought would turn annoyed.

Ah, well. He still cut a fine figure.

A Time Lord is master of his environment, for he is superior. He does not mingle and sport. He does not form emotional attachments with his environment, his surroundings, or the lessor beings and objects around him.

If only he could adapt his TARDIS with the same skill in which he'd adapted himself. The poor girl was grounded, her heart all but crushed. He ached for her, wished she was back in the Universe the way she was meant to be.

But he could, and did, explore the primitive Earth technology and found himself rather in love of many of its bits and pieces. Children's toys, for the most part, but some odd little bit of Terran thinking, some sideways solution to a problem, would startle him out of his fugue and draw him into a brief foray into Humanity.

His First self had hidden in the annals of History. Two had been dabbling in History—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say History had collided smack into him, judging by how truly epic horrors seemed to follow him in that life. But things were now different. For the first time, he was living in history. It was not an always unpleasant sensation.

His sonic screwdriver reflected the adaptations of his exile. Little bits of thinking and experience trickled here and there into its design. Sound was ever a fascinating collections of Laws for the Universe. Why not explore sound's potential as a tool?

He had always loved sound. Music was an expression of personal revelry that approached a spiritual mantra. He remembered a Recorder, but not why he'd chosen it as his instrument.

A vulgar, disgusting human toy.

He'd felt the Council's disdain of it.

A crude attempt to higher intelligence; nothing more than a hollowed-out tree branch with holes drilled clumsily on one side. He could have harped the Solar Winds with a dryxl, or sculpted sonatas with a fine laser tynnal! He could have echoed the very heartbeat of the Universe with a quasar metronome, floated the pure musical notes of the crystalline Galaxies with a liquid ruby, but no, but he mocked his people even in this, with his primate's prancing stick.

He never played the recorder, never even looked at it gathering dust on one of his many shelves in the old Control Room. The Sonic Screwdriver was his instrument now.

Now he created music with an instrument invented long before the Human Race. He sang now, for his throat was both primitive (in terms of age) and intricate. It was the one instrument they could not ruin or confiscate.

He learned even the lullabies of other races and species. And he sang them. How that would infuriate them if they knew!

He learned the music of other languages, effortlessly. The tonal values of Mandarin Chinese rippled and flowed in a mathematically pleasing poetry; the nasal tricks of Siberian Yakuts and he grew angry, terribly angry at the Bridgadier for pretending he couldn't speak Gaelic, that most noble and beautiful tongue.

He used his languages happily. He travelled the world's metaphorical four corners, a trapped tourist, and had the time of his life even if he couldn't admit it.

He could speak French, but avoided it for reasons he preferred not to think. He had absolutely no desire to go to France, and changed the subject whenever Waterloo came up. Thoughts of Napoleon made him twist up somewhere in the vicinity of her hearts. He understood that the Brigadier was offering the hand of friendship when he asked if the Doctor wanted to come with him to Flanders Fields, visit the science museums whilst the Brig paid honored to his dead friends. But the thoughts of going over there made him stammer out a refusal that didn't make a bit of sense and he locked himself in his TARDIS for the rest of the day.

The Brigadier left, and he didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed in himself, so he sat in a quiet corner with his Sonic Screwdriver in his large hands. He loved the reflection of himself in his Screwdriver, but it was by no means his only sign of mechanical attachment. Bessie was his favorite. There was something about her design that made him feel three hundred years younger, how eternally astonished even he could be that she could move with grace and agility incongruous with her shape.

They had stripped his mind of all the useful Time Travel information he needed to get off Earth, but they had made a mistake in letting him around the resources of UNIT. The Humans thought his absorption with Bessie was harmlessly eccentric; a hobby to occupy his time and energies when he wasn't working for them. If the Time Lords had hoped the human race would be a hard taskmaster to him, they were foiled. Compared to most of his "wardens" in the past, he was ridiculously pampered and spoiled. It was all in the attitude; they could be nosy and overbearing, but they knew he was willing to give of himself and risk his own neck to keep Earth safe, just as they would.

So he accepted their indulgence, and tinkered away, silently and magnanimously pitying the poor, simple minds that didn't know that machines, rocks, crystals and trees possessed energetic vibrations, paths of life and life-force. Only a few admitted they felt a machine could have a 'soul', but they were shy about it. Their primitive religions forbade such hearsay. This planet had far to go before the religious totality evolved to spiritual science on par with Tibetan thought, or Nigerian IFA, or the gemstone-bright shamanism that existed in pockets here and there throughout the sub-industrialized globe.

And yet they didn't complain or laugh when he referred to Bessie in human terms. The Brigadier once lifted a brow to one of his comments and walked away muttering something about John Muir that he didn't understand, but Jo beamed like pure golden sun and quoted the Rev. Audrey, author of children's books about living trains and how steam engines were the most human of trains. He scoffed, but he was gruff and he smiled. It was nice to get these unexpected little glimpses of common ground with another species...especially a species so different from his own.

He was learning about himself as he learned about basic mechanical wizardry all over again.

It was wonderful.

A shame, really, that Gallifreyans didn't have their children learn about the primitive basics when they were in school. It could be a relaxing thing, studying something as clumsy as a spark plug and glimpsing the burgeoning intellect that had first dreamed it up...took the dream and made it happen.

He loved visiting the Earthers' NARO satellites because the technology was a rare marriage between the most modern and the primitive. Rarer still, the marriage was a happy, peaceful one. Vehicles had to be Diesel-based rather than spark-plug because the sparks—as well as much forms of technological communication—would disrupt the delicate receiving dishes.

It reminded him that the success of technology often began with need for harmony.

And to be honest, a Time Lord would have never stumbled across the ingenious solution of "doing without"-they never did without! Here on Earth they took this fascinating problem and made it into a point of pride!

It didn't change the fact that he ached for his freedom. It made him irritable; he snapped and snarled on some days out of proportion to the situation, and his personal value slipped lower and lower until he was ready to rip his hair out for a kind word, some thing that would show that someone outside of Earth knew he was here...knew him and missed him even.

He wanted to know if anyone still missed him.

Susan he never dared think of. She was in his past, safe. The barest of stray thoughts might betray her, for this planet was not as isolated as the Time Lords had thought. It was a revelation that was as startling as it was giddying—well, electrifying would be a better word. Giddy was imprecise and he didn't like it.

And then another invasion of Earth hit. Then another. Just how safe was Earth anyway?

Perhaps Earth's very isolation and primitive level, perhaps its very undesirable-ness had made it very desirable for a certain disturbing faction of aggression?

Chilling thought!

Initially he'd thought of Earth as a limited refuge—the worst thing that could happen to them would be a natural disaster—earthquake, fire, flood, erupting volcanoes, even a primitive war was a better way to die than most of the possibilities lurking in the darkest pockets of the Universe.

Earth might be a backwater, but it was starting to show signs of catching up for lost time.

He wondered how much longer Earth would remain a boring, dull, monotonous floating prison.

Just the very asking of that question, when he was alone, made him a little nervous.

He felt responsible for these people—he was the most intelligent being on the planet, after all—someone needed to take responsibility! They needed guidance or help or both.

Oh, Bryxilititisscnichtr and Aggador's Hwuiniwitzl. Make that both.

Every night after work he sat by himself to think these bits and pieces through—Jo always popped her little head in to see if he needed or wanted anything before she left, and he tolerated this because she was sincere about her desire to help him. He caught himself smiling at her and toning down his voice for her more than he did the others—even Liz Shaw hadn't really conjured up that part of himself. She wasn't asking to help as his assistant or secretary, but as a friend. She reminded him enough of his old friends...Jamie and Zoe had both carried that same sweetness to their souls—a sweetness that didn't change the fact that they were all three tough as Martian fingernails underneath the sweetness.

Jo would have loved to know Jamie and Zoe.

He caught himself fantasizing of introducing the three of them.

And then he would sigh, wistful and gloomy, and remember his responsibilities to this little planet. Even if he could forget for longer than a few minutes, he had too many remainders to the contrary.

His grounded TARDIS.

The painful black holes in his memory.

The loss of his dearest friends.

The bracelet clamped about his right wrist to go with their dratted watch.

The tattoo they'd branded on his Second Self to mark him as a penitent criminal on assignment—they wouldn't let that go away with his regeneration, oh no. For some reason that bothered him even more than the bracelet. He had a faint echo of a memory or trying his best to get that brand removed...but how? What had happened?

He couldn't forget his humiliation even if he wanted to (and he did wish he could let it sleep in his mind at least once in a while). But he also knew why there were so many elaborate punishments upon his body, mind, and spirit.

Because try as they might, even the entire Council's combined weight of mental power, experience, questionable wisdom and ANGER against him couldn't give them complete satisfaction.

He had stood up to the Time Lords.

He had defied them.

Even the memory of the pain and being broken wasn't enough to take away that drunken delight.

He had defied them.

What was facing an army of Daleks next to that moment of courage? Sometimes he still couldn't believe himself. But he had, hadn't he? Hence a punishment of severity and cruelty almost unheard of in the so-called Enlightened Era of Gallifrey.

But he had stood up, and spoken what was right, did what was right, even though he wasn't the only Time Lord to think as he did, and say what he said, he had been the first one to say it in the courts of Time's Law.

I was the first, he thinks again.

They chained him in this new body, chained him to a primitive planet, isolated him from his loved ones, and they'd chained him literally with the Time Bracelet and branded him with the Gallifreyan Cobra, but in the end of things...that was all they could do to him.

He had defied them.

And he wasn't going to stop.

Why stop with just the Time Lords? If there was one clear piece of memory left intact from Two, it was his inability to stay quiet. In retrospect, how it must have infuriated the stuffy old puffed-up Robes in Office to see a Time Lord going against their policies, and causing such a bad example! When had speaking the truth become a bad thing?

He was going to keep speaking up.

And he didn't care who saw him do it.


	3. The Powers of Two: Four: Composite Numbers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to both Tom Baker, who was amazing but frequently undervalued for the little sparkly bits he put in his role. Patrick Troughton is the first Doctor recorded in the (existing) episodes as offering Jelly Babies. (In the non-existent bits of THE DOMINATORS, there is a scene where he is scarfing down a bag of sweets in Jamie's presence, presumably building up his energy stores for another go against the problem). He offers other sweets in other episodes, such as lemon sherbets in The Wheel in Space, and treats candy as a form of actual sustenance, unaware they are nothing more than a quick-fix of energy for the Humans around him.
> 
> Off-screen, Pat continued to offer Jelly Babies, as treats for the newscasters interviewing him and a scene exists in THE FIVE DOCTORS where he blandly pulls out a paper sack in front of the pillar and says, "Have a Jelly Baby?" To which Pertwee and Hartnell join in.

FOUR: COMPOSITE NUMBERS

He loves jelly babies.

He remembers eating them on a busy, dirty little street in London, with the lumpy cobblestones pressing up against his toes through thin shoe-leather. He also remembers his first touch of that strange texture, a brown paper sack rendered soft and silky from constant smoothing and rustling.

Somewhere deep, there's a memory of his hot cheek pressed against a cool, blessedly cool stonework floor, and a gentle woman's small hand opening a small brown paper packet, pressing something small and sweet in his palm as the light above their heads sizzle and burn odd little sodium patterns upon the sculpted white ceiling and the centuries-old frescoed walls. He's hurting for reasons he can't understand. She's murmuring something just for him, telling him something that makes him feel better or at least...not alone. Above them, the Time-Clock gongs the twenty-ninth hour in that shattered second of Mind/Time, and after that he isn't certain what goes on. But it did exist and he wasn't going to go after it until he had nothing better to do.

On the nights when there is nothing but solitude, he sits up with a paper bag filled to the brim with the little sweets and props his boots up against the blank portion of the Console, munching away with his indulgence, his yo-yo, occasional scans from outside the TARDIS...and his thoughts. It's an equitable arrangement and it has yet to fail him. Just a quiet time with the TARDIS and himself, two beings gently sharing the same space.

Sleep comes less and less to him and he wonders if it would be one of those proofs of his approaching middle age. 750 years is nothing to sneeze about, but still. He doesn't like to throw his age around the Humans. They seem to mistake his greater years as proof of godliness or something just as confusing. Why humans would mistake the length of one's age with wisdom was beyond him, but every species developed at its own pace.

The Console rises and falls, sighs and breathes, and he listens to its unique music, tapping an absent temp with the heel of his left boot and letting his long fingers swim inside the bottoms of his deep pockets. It's cool here; he likes it cool. He's more alert in the absence of heat but he always remembers to turn the heat up to the point where it was cozy for his Human companions. Sarah Jane likes it at about 70-even.

Jamie and Zoe liked it cold...She was from the Wheel, where heat meant fuel and fuel meant cost. And Jamie? Jamie was a Scot! I only heard him complain of the cold once, in the Himalayas! The three of us were quite good at 55 degrees, but Jamie begged for colder once in a while so he could get his blood going...

He told us a story once of two giants fighting over a stone bridge in his homeland. Ice and Frost...he liked it cold...

The Doctor shakes the memory off, for it is very brief; its lifespan no greater than a Vetruvian egg fly's. He notes that factor of human adapatability again. He's grown addicted to cataloging and filing away bits and pieces about humans; trivia of what they have been known to do (and not do).

Life was precious, even if it had to be thrown away for the greater good. He didn't like it but there was no avoiding the facts. He also knew that liking or disliking had nothing to do with how many lives were spared or taken.

But he would always hesitate to kill. Always.

He remembers being told by distant voices that his memories would be erased...but the memory is one-dimensional and with no more feeling than reading cold words in a book. His diary helps, but there are (he suspects) bits and pieces not in it. He frowns, wondering if there is another diary somewhere, but that thought is fleeting and he is distracted with another puzzle and he puts that thought aside and doesn't pick it up again until he's on his Seventh Incarnation.

Sarah Jane found a recorder in the old Control Room and he didn't even think of it as "his." He also found a broken Time Bracelet covered in dust, deep in a violently-flung corner of the TARDIS. There are some things one didn't have to remember if they didn't want to remember...and he didn't.

He rather misses his Last Self, but can't regret being an improvement. His First Self...he remembered being an old man a bit better than he did as a young one, save for that one and all-too vivid memory about the Hand of Omega. Memories of his days at school are beginning to hurt. He doesn't want to dwell too long on anything that reminds him too much of The Master. Romana was merciful and did not often make a comment or observation. Sometimes on his trips off-Earth something will stop him dead in his tracks and make him think of Gallifrey: the color of a plant, or the tint of a sunset; the sound of a brook inside a tunnel. These moments are needle-swift and vanish from the flesh of his thoughts just as quickly.

He's busy this time around. No stranded refuge like back at UNIT, and if there's such a thing as a long-term and SAFE planet in which he can just stop and sit and take time with repairs he hasn't found it yet. Even Romana warned they were getting a little too active; they aren't getting enough rest. The poor Girl is showing the strain. Her wall colors dull at times, fading to grey and the lighting reflects the moods of himself and his Companions. When she tires he tires; when he sickens she diminishes.

It is so very hard to believe there was ever a time in which he didn't have this rapport with the TARDIS. His First Self certainly hadn't! Well, he had been much younger in those days. Now the notion of damaging her parts simply to satisfy his scientific curiosity filled him with cold dread. He knew it had taken a lot of time and effort to build up her trust after his first self emptied her mercury.

He must have done something right during his Second life, because he clearly remembered how his Third Self fought as hard as the TARDIS for the two of them to be free. They had combined forces together, Time Lord and Time Machine, confounding the static brains that struggled to control them. Eventually they had gained/earned their freedom, after that horrendous mess with Omega.

He has more Companions than ever, but Sarah Jane is still closest to his hearts. He even teased her, manipulated her into making herself better than she thinks she is capable of. Her primitive society meant she has had to fight for her self-worth more than she really ought; he's still pleased that she never ran away from him. He still regrets dropping her off and leaving her on Earth, but maybe some day he could pick her up again? Yes, there was always time.

"Tears, Sarah Jane?" She had wept at his Change between Then and Now, the first Human to weep for him in...how long?

A long time.

She had cared.

He was touched, wondering for the first time if Humans could sacrifice their tender, fragile and delicate hearts for long-lived, hardened and admittedly hoary old Time Lords despite the obstacles between them. It was such a hard burden for these short-lived beings. How COULD they care about tiresome people like him? What was it about Humans that let them live in the Moment long enough to form soul-attachments?

Jo didn't run away, he reminds himself. She found another Human. He shouldn't be sad about that, but there are times when his too-accurate memory triggers that long, lonely moment in which he stood by himself at her farewell party, drank his glass, and drove away in Bessie. He'd offered to show her other planets in his own way, and she'd declined.

That was the risk with asking; you could hope for one answer, but get another).

Did she turn to another Human because she'd felt there was nothing in a hope for themselves?

Sarah Jane's example reminds him of the positive in Humans, and there are times when he needs it! They are his favorite species—absolutely! But they concern him at times, for they can leapfrog through the Galaxy without rhyme or reason and other species could certainly suffer in their wake. He likes that no matter how despotic, how totalitarian or backwards—even perfect a Human society could be, there is still no such thing as a Universal Hive Mind. There is always, always someone who thinks against the current and outside of the box.

The Human Factor, bless it.

He had been thinking of that indomitable element once, as Sarah Jane rested from that business with the Ark-more than a little dreadful, but Noah, thankfully, had survived enough of himself long enough to save his original people.

The Human Factor, he mused, smiling, seconds before a memory long-lost welled up in his brain.

Himself, playing with Daleks.

Shocked, he nearly dropped his Sonic Screwdriver.

What in Time and Space had he done?

Seconds later his brain had caught up.

Playing with Daleks! And yet there it was! Himself, laughing, as Daleks gave him a ride and spun in circles for the joy of being dizzy!

At first he thought himself temporarily insane -a logical assumption; the brilliant ones did go mad with saddening frequency- but he glanced down in his memory and caught a glimpse of a smaller hand poking out of a too-large frock coat and checked trousers.

Ah. What a relief. He wasn't mad. It was just one of Two's mad memories.

Two's mental archives were usually more trouble than they were worth; he'd struggle long and hard in pursuit of something that felt important, only to be baffled at the conclusion: Two was full of rather simple, plebian memories, of moments of warmth and comfort and all the delight of an overgrown child. If it was an important memory, Four could recall it easily (some days he felt he knew far, far too much about Cybermen).

The whole paradoxical mess translated to the decision that if he couldn't remember it quickly, it wasn't important. Two's memories had not been stripped of the vital, useful things like enemies, machines, science and events. No, the stripped bits were just not needed.

But Four's brain was a ferocious one, and it didn't take long to realize his memory wasn't damaged or recovered from a wipe by the Time Lords...it had just been buried.

And he soon saw why.

There was grief lingering inside the synaptic echoes that made up Two. He'd used the Human Factor to teach Daleks to question, and to know loyalty to friends. And after teaching them humanity he'd run off, knowing he'd set the seeds for the Human-Dalek massacre in his absence.

You didn't have a choice, he reminds his long-dead self, which for the first time gives him insight to that mental schizophrenia Humans complained about. It was a mercy that they died quickly.

And it was a good thing it was a memory, because if this was schizophrenia, or a case of split personalities arguing with each other, he'd have to break the bad news to himself that for all his efforts on Skaro, he hadn't destroyed them after all. They kept coming back into his life, again and again—at least his Third Self hadn't seen that much of them—Three had dealt with the Master more than anything and no wonder he'd regenerated early. Koschei had a habit of sucking all the useful gases out of a room when he walked in. How someone could be so smart and so tiresome at the same time...

Ugh!

Four muttered to himself, temporarily lost in the murk of his mood swing. Hadn't he thought enough about the Master? Things had been taut enough between them without his constant showing up and prancing about like some sort of Pre-Rassilon Lord. Ugh and Double-ugh. What was he trying to do, Dominate the Galaxy just to show you could be abjectedly evil and pose as the latest fashion model too?

Hmph.

His first self had discarded his robes of Office and his Sash of Citizenry at about the same time he'd taken care of the Hand of Omega. Afterwards he'd taken on the Human costumes. It had helped him hide in their midst beneath the angry search-beams that was the scald of Time Lord Attention.

His third self had flash and flair on the outside but kept a minimalism on the inside to reflect his recent interest in Eastern Thought (it did cross Four's mind to wonder how in the Blessed Names of Time and Space had his hyperactive Second Self found the opportunity to not only meet up with the Holy Man). A string saw in his boot and his trusty sonic screwdriver was the usual extent of things for Three. He depended on his hands and feet and combat skills and demeanor and diplomatic skills. It usually got the job done.

Something about the Master's smug, smirking gloaty-ness had grated Four the wrong way, like Christmas-tree cabbages, and he was now dressed in a way that made the Master cringe just a teensy-weensy bit every time they were seen together.

Great triumphs come out of the smallest of victories. He remembered how the Master had struggled to keep his composure and failed by a tiny tic in his perfect face as he took in the Giant Bohemian his arch-enemy had become. His clothes were comfortable, and efficiency should lead fashion, not the other way around. The Master's vanity had been fed by being matched against his dandier self; time to take that bit out of the equation!

Unlike Three, his pockets are full again. Joyously, gloriously full of things, but not just things he might find useful. He is alone a great deal of the Time, so he carries things that bring him instant pleasure and things he might need in a pinch. He's found an unexpected love of Earth food and drink and something tells him this is important to his recovery of something Very Bad. Something he really can't remember so he won't.

He pulls out another jelly baby, his restless brain latched on to the prop, conjured up the memory of his first purchase. There they sat in a London shop-corner in London and he's curious enough to go in and buy a bag. Oh, ambrosia. The marriage of chemistry and scent and texture is all the more terrifically, fantastically, gigantically amazing because the Humans aren't aware they've all but bent the laws of the Universe in making something like this.

Jelly babies are absolute perfection: Earth could market this to Gallifrey as Brain Food. The sugars, trace elements and not a few tasty fossil-organic synthetic chemicals used for colors are better and faster than a psi-drug. And they aren't habit-forming! For Jelly babies alone, the Time Lords should re-evaluate Humans.

Their ginger beer isn't bad either but he'd hate to go to a party on Gallifrey with that in the punchbowl.

(Now there was food for thought—literally. He should remember that the next time they dragged him into one of their terrible functions...)

A sudden smile crosses his face as he imagines many possible outcomes of stuffy academics with ginger-beer and jelly babies. It's an impish expression and sweet. A moment later it's gone, flitting to a slight frown of puzzlement as one memory skipped to another. Why did he keep thinking of the Brigadier and jelly babies?

Humans and their peculiar social dramas. He recalled his first days of Identity, huddled over the TARDIS board when Benton came in practically hauling the Brigadier in on his left elbow. He squinted his puzzlement, wondering what obscure and ill-translated Earth custom he was missing, when Benton elbowed the Brig hard in his ninth rib (oops, Human meant 7th rib).

"Excuse me." The Brig cleared his throat and held out a tiny pasteboard box. "It's Switchover Night...a bit of a UNIT tradition and I wondered if you wanted to join in." Deeply awkward about it all, the Brig set the box down. Chocolates and whipped meringues, baked to delicate perfection in assorted shapes.

"Eh?"

"Easy enough, Doctor." The Brigadier steeled his shoulders to the straight and the solid, leveling him with a blackberry eye. "Would you like a sweet?"

"Oh. OH. I see." He caught on with admirable speed, and dug into his pockets for the proper response to this primitive Human custom of gift-giving. Ah, there it was. He beamed and produced the rumpled paper wad in his outstretched palm. "Would you care for a Jelly Baby?"

"Now, what made the Brigadier react like that? Anyone would think he'd never been offered a simple act of kindness before!"

Benton smiled but the smile was just as sad as the look on his departed superior's face. "It's a bit of a long story, Doctor. It just made him think of an old friend."

"Is his friend dead?"

"Oh. Oh, no, sir...just...where he can't talk to him any more."

Four sighs through his large nose. He's remembering...why humans are his favorite species again. Why he trusted in hiding here in the first place.

The bitterness of his exile as Three is softening. With his recovered freedom he is finding more wonders in the Universe and oddly enough, he keeps finding Humans within these wonders. Maybe he could think of his exile on Earth as a training period. They were easier to fathom after long exposure.

Humans are simplistic to a fault, but when they get complicated on you, it is an utter whopper of a surprise. He finally asked the Brigadier why he would look at him so oddly when he thought he wasn't looking, and the man never turned a hair, as if he'd expected to be caught out some day.

"I was just wondering if you ever miss your past selves." Was the stiff and formal answer. "It is a rude and personal question and I shan't trouble you for an answer. But you asked what I was doing, and that is my answer."

With that the man marched a crisp about-face out of the room, leaving him feeling as though he'd missed something else. By accident his gaze had fallen upon the calendar and the date seemed familiar. Boredom made this miniscule riddle the most interesting event of his day, so he flipped through his diary and re-acquainted himself with an old memory involving the first time he'd met the Brigadier.

Underground. Yeti again. Holding a gun to him in the darkness, and looking down quite a bit because he had been quite a bit smaller that time around (Erum, hello, how do you do, I'm the Doctor...).

Miss his past selves? How could he? What an odd question! He was missing something here, some nuance of Humanity, but it would be cheating to ask directly. He was certain he could un-ravel the riddle to the solution in time. Hmph. Couldn't they just be the funniest creatures. He settled back in his chair and pulled his yo-yo out for a few spins as the TARDIS did a few spins of her own.

A yo-yo keeps his hands occupied, and the simplicity of the toy is addictive; so much you can do with a string and a bit of wood. You can do complex things with the simplest of things, and that is why the yo-yos are so compelling. He wonders if these simple toys are the key to human's creative thinking. It would be nice if so.

For too long he and the TARDIS had been yo-yos of the Time Lords and he could be forgiven his occasional screaming outrage to the skies as he sat, stumped for movement, waiting to find out why they'd sent him here, there, and everywhere all over "their" balliwicks. Romana had been embarrassed when he yelled at them at the top of his lungs, but it had made him feel much better. Secretly, he suspected they were more annoyed by his toys, and that was plenty of reason to keep his yo-yo.

Play helps him think. It clears the radio static in his head (seems like it's been there since that bit with the Spiders), but there are times when his fingers stroke the smooth wooden toy, feeling the psychic warmth of the residual aura, and just the tiniest traces of Artron energy...when the grooved cylinder stops being a cylinder and reminds him for just a nanosecond that he held another cylinder once; long and slender, graceful and simple in its design.

There's something about the recorder that reminds him of his yo-yo...or vicey versa. He isn't sure, but it is important. It baffles and frustrates him so he doesn't bother with it too much and any way, he's too busy. There are always more urgent and important things to deal with. Disconnected mummified hands, Martians, and Daleks (again with the dratted Daleks!) for example. The list goes on and on. Even his big brain doesn't want to catalog it all. There are new species to meet (or "encounter" because "collide into" might be a better term but it isn't nicer). Sometimes he wonders how the Time Lords can possibly sit amongst themselves like bored choirboys, ignoring the wonders of the Universe around them because their studies are more important. Honestly! How often can one poke around the same old parsec for enlightenment? Once you've written your third paper on the discovery of the seventy-eleventh dimension there's just not much left to do!

His negative judgments against Gallifrey come easily as breathing. Something bothers him about trusting his own people. Even without all the mumbo-jumbo of his past experiences as Three and Two (he pities his second self, let's be honest). There's an absence of data that jars his Time Lord sensibilities.

If only he could remember the source of the distrust, but for some bizarre reason, his mind wants to send him back down to nonsensical paths—what would Gulliver's Travels have to do with the Chancellor?

Well, his previous selves weren't always the brightest stars in the sky. That was the good bit of getting older, wasn't it? He was approaching middle age and he knew he was much smarter. Everything boiled down to Two's memories, and what memories he did have of Two weren't so very impressive. Cybermen, Daleks, Ice Warriors, Yeti, The Great Intelligence, basic stuff such as that. But it was to be expected that Two would avoid anything to do with Gallifreyan politics.

He avoided them as well, but the fact of the matter was, he knew they were cracked sources of information—blinded by their own Temporal Altruism for Gallifrey. Pity.

Sometimes he wondered how he'd managed to live to his fourth incarnation, and he would rub his forearm absently, where a snake had once been branded into his skin, before returning to his double loops.

Melancholy, he thought, using the Terran word because no such concept existed among the languages of Gallifrey. Just melancholy. He was getting older. That might explain his temper. Not a few people had commented on his cruel treatment of his own people upon his emergency inauguration, but he hadn't felt like giving them an honest answer. How often had they given him one?

As cruel as they'd been to him, what'd he'd done to them in return wasn't even a token courtesy return.

He rubbed at his arm again, caught himself, and tugged at his wooly scarf instead. That was better.

Maybe he'd been altered during his exile. Gallifreyans didn't really mean so much to him any more. He was throwing his lot in with Humans...but that made sense, didn't it? Humans were indomitable, but still weak, short-lived, frail, fragile...little more than delicate blooms of life in a bitter Universe. Gallifreyans, on the other hand, were anything but. They were physically superior, mentally elevated, socially secure...

...inexcusably dull...

Dare he say it, even The Master was dull. At least Humans were never completely predictable.

And the Master, Rassilon help them all, could be very predictable, the way you knew how the other chess player was predictable. It always came down to two players with 16 pieces each, shoveled across the game-board. There were only 318,979,564,000 possible choices in the first four moves of the game, and he was positive they'd gone through more than half of them.

But that last business on Gallifrey...that business had...smarted.

The Chancellor had been too polite, too self-assured when he looked at him, as if he'd known something beyond Borusa and the others; had known something about him.

Smug complacency and condescension was the default expression and demeanor of Time Lords, but it rankled him all the way down his nine ribs (or did he have ten this time? Must check! Maybe one of these days he'd wind up with a few more. Wouldn't that just annoy the Loom Mechanics at Lungbarrow!).

Something about Goth's smile.

The Fourth Doctor grumbled to himself. He just hated these nights when his thoughts were all over the place, never settling down but skittling about like so many solar winds. The only thing he could do was wait for the mind-storm to settle down.

And let the thoughts play through.

Flip.

Spin.

The yo-yo came back up for another go.

Bad enough he'd answered that Summons with all due haste and left Sarah Jane behind on Earth! He hated that! He still missed her, kept looking up thinking he'd see her in the doorway again, complaining about his lack of direction and bad timing. But no, he'd taken her back to her own people, and gone to Gallifrey because it HAD been an emergency and for what? A trap! They'd impounded his precious TARDIS! Because it was "no longer in service!" Oh, the nerve! The indignity of treating his oldest and dearest friend in such a way!

One indignity soon followed the next, and why hadn't he been more surprised that Gallifreyans were interrogating suspects under torture? But he wasn't. Being here again, among his people had started to trigger echoes of memories—not strong enough for his mind to collect and haul them in for further inspection, but real enough that they began to influence his thinking.

When you came down to it, that was much more frightening than being framed for murdering one's President, including the accusations, lack of belief amongst your own kind, and getting painfully, painfully questioned by people who didn't really seem to care what you said, so long as you were screaming.

Running for President under Article 17 had been a madman's inspiration. It seemed he was better at acting under desperation than he'd thought.

Yes...all's well that ends well, but he personally vowed to himself for all Regenerations to come to stay the blazes away from the Matrix and to never, ever, ever, ever, ever ever have anything to do with it ever again. Once was enough!

Once?

Oh, no. He wasn't going to pursue that ghost-question! No, no, no! No, no, no!

He almost slapped himself on the face to stop that thought, and took a deep breath of relief, returning to the original stream of thought.

The swift coalescence of events had left him dazed and battered. He left with the Old Girl. Time Lord and Home Planet both pulled deep breaths of Cosmic thankfulness that they were parted once again. Borusa, for one, looked ready to throw a fifty-year party even if it meant he had to spend his nephews' marriage dowries in the bargain.

For the first time, he felt his people were beginning to understand that it was better that he stay away.

Deep breath, everyone!

Four breathed deep, smiling to himself. Events were past. He was back with his TARDIS. He had Companions, friends, sleeping in the artificial night. Adric, thank the small mercies, had been blessedly diverted with a room of logic and puzzle games in one of his old rooms. The Doctor didn't go there; it reminded him too much of another young human, a girl who also had short, dark hair and deep eyes and an "arthimetical mind." He didn't have one at the time—Mathematics had been a frequent thorn of One, who hadn't gotten through the Square Roots until his fifth birthday (proof that no one was perfect). He liked numbers now. He knew inside his hearts it was due to a small, smiling little girl who matched his intellect with powers of her own. Sweet child.

The Console bleeped and he glanced up from another loop, saw all was well, and let his head drop back down. Where was he? Oh, yes. Gallifrey. He was gone from Gallifrey and it would be a dashed long time before he ever went back! The whole experience with the Master had done more than sour his tender chance of reconciliation with his people. It had knocked some sort of hole in his pysche: he was actually dreaming on the rare nights he slept.

Time Lords rarely dreamed, but since the President's murder, he'd a rash of them and he didn't like them at all. They weren't the mental gedankenexperiments of a Time Lord, but rather, more like the phantomy dreams typical of Humans.

Repeating themes, he recalled, were common for Humans who needed to work something out of their subconscious mind. And these "dreams" were always the same: Walking over and over through an endless set of grey-brown corridors of a strange building in the dead of night when the Citadel slept. Humans said it was perfectly ordinary to be in a place you'd never been in and feel you knew it in dreams. Well, felt he ought to know these eerie halls, but he didn't. They were foreboding, and he was trying to move quietly, not be seen...always trying not to be seen.

Not to be noticed.

The Guards weren't guards at all, but giant statues sculpted to look like Rassilon's Chess Players. They lined the walls, stone eyes opened and unmoving, and they let him pass, but he knew in his dreams that if he did...something...something he wanted to do...every one of them would step away from the wall, stopping him.

If this was a Human Dream, then by Human rules he felt his own people were his prison-keepers, ever watching and disapproving, ever silent until he made a mistake before their stirred themselves to move.

That had to be it. Mystery solved.

Chilly as these images were, most of them ended happily. They ended with the hum of the TARDIS in his brain, and he would wake up from the dream and into reality warmed by that soft, sweet purr. They were a perfect team now, he and she. Bad as his experiences had been, he still had his TARDIS and she had him and he was doubly justified in stealing her. What would they have done to her if he hadn't? Scrapped her on some terrible heap like her sisters! Perish the thought!

No one would ever hurt her.

Ever again!

?

He frowned at that last bit, wondering where that came from, and rubbed at his right wrist.

Maybe nocturnal introspection was a side-effect of being around Humans? It was their natural spiritual state, proven by the overwhelming majority of their written literature.

Perhaps he needed to take a side-trip. Another planet? Some place new?

Yes...yes, that would work. At least he'd be someplace new, and that was the best medicine of all.

Four set the controls with a smile and a figurative wink, drawing co-ordinants out of the console at random, but playing it safe: wherever and whenever, it should be breathable!

But one last thought escaped: Borusa's statement haunted him, and haunted him still:

"We must adjust the truth!"

Much later, he finds himself swinging in the wind of a very different truth. The Master's laugh is still ringing in his ears, and to his saddened realization, he hears another ringing in his head with it.

The TARDIS is calling him.

He hadn't heard this particular song in...a long time.

Doctor, spat the Dalek.

Doctor, hissed a Silurian.

Dok-tor-from a Dominator.

Something's wrong...he thinks fuzzily. All the fatigue and pain and worlds-weariness has caught up with him; he feels twice his 750 years. That's not my memory, is it?

His first Change had been perfect, but he couldn't remember much of what followed it, just the Change that came after, all pain and grief and something that ended with the scent of heather against his cheek.

Tears, Sarah Jane?

Doctor?

Doctor.

Doctor.

Doctor.

Doctor Doctor Doctor.

Oh, there they all were. How nice of his mind to show them again.

Doctor? Doctor... Doctor!

Doctordoctordoctor...

He hung suspended between life and death, and death was waiting.

I had to face my fear, he'd told Sarah Jane. That was more important.

The Doctor recognized he was about to step into something completely, utterly new.

His first Life had ended naturally and simply.

His second Life had ended in violence and pain; he'd Changed, fighting angrily every cell of the way.

His third Life had cast out his Reincarnation as a Mallow threw out its seeds in the blaze of wildfire: The parent burned, the pod saved. He'd ended in the ashes of battle; a good battle, one fought hard. The fight over, the victory won...and the victory over himself greater.

His fourth Life was about to end...

Not of his planning,

but of his Choosing.

This time, he plucked himself.

And he fell to the Future.


	4. Five: Sum of Memories

FIVE: The Sum of his Memories

Every Time Lord was a sum of his experiences...and bits and pieces of his past lives that had been proven profitable.

He found himself liking himself a great deal. He was comfortable in his skin even if he was less comfortable around some of the minds he was meeting. His clothes were no longer too baggy, too loose, too anything. He was dressing himself smart and cleanly. His clothes are nice, clean lines and the beauty of the things made by straight lines.

In his youth, he loved curves. Curves were the shortest distance on planets but straight lines remind him of waves; radio; dimensional planes. It was an act of rebellion to like them. He was not interested in rebelling for its own sake now. This is his fifth time around, and five is the atomic number of Boron. Boron is produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation, and that means lots and lots of straight lines.

He smoothed out the TARDIS and streamlined the Desktop Theme of his new Control Room. A part of him hated to do it because it meant really and truly burying that older Room in nostalgic mothballs, but his Fourth Self had been right; that old Room was incurably tetchy. Never sent you where you really wanted to go. The TARDIS personality was too entrenched into that small space. The Doctor didn't want to fight, quarrel, or BEG the TARDIS do do anything. He just wanted some simplicity to his life and there was no cleaning out that Room. Best to just start over, save the Old Room for spare parts or power and hope that nothing accidentally left in there decided to go wandering out.

Five prided himself on his progress. He was learning to let go of things he didn't need.

He catches himself in mirrors more often, which is a little odd. He's been quite vain in the past. His First Self had never completely shaken the Draconian sensibilities of the Time Lords: One must dress properly if one expects to be respected. He'd had fine clothes of practical, ornamental and sentimental value, a signet ring and gold chain. After the encumbrance of Gallifreyan fashion the Doctor had found he could actually choose what size to wear. He'd never completely gotten over that delight.

Something his Third Self had said once, about how his Second Self liked to wear their Original Self's hand-me-downs. It made him smile every time he remembered it, because he could also glimpse a bit of fondness for Two.

An absent academic guru applied to his First Self quite neatly. His Second Self was universally described as "Cosmic Hobo," which Three had been proud to coin. Three had been criticized as being a Dandy, and Two had muttered a one-upman to that, "Dandy-lion," in reference to his hair, and Four had been the only thing that could make Two and Three pause in shared, slack-jawed amazement.

Five couldn't blame them. Four had been...

...striking.

Of them all, Four could honestly say he was more riveting than the Lighthouse of Alexandria. That poor city...

Five let his selves have their Times, their moments, their identities. He was new, renewed, a slate cleaned up and set upright. This was the first time he'd been drawn to clothing for a specific purpose.

First chose to be respected.

Two chose to hide.

Three chose to warn others he was not to be trifled with.

Four chose to distract—not quite like Two, but the intent was the same.

Now he was free.

He wore clean, light, bright colors, summery and smiling. He liked trainers with his suit but regretted the silly stares. There was no reason for Humans' insisting that those shoes wouldn't fit with his clothing. They fit very fine, thank you. And the celery...what was it with their funny notions? He clearly remembered the Elizabethan Court carrying around carrot-tops for decorations! Ah, well. At least rosemary had fallen out of fashion. The Doctor suspected his olfactory experiences would never completely recover from that trip to Shakespeare.

Five studied his face in the mirror again, for a Time Lord naturally felt the urge to see his past. It was an exercise in contemplation that kept them grounded, discouraging that dangerous isolationist mentality so many of the Old Bloods were prone to getting.

His bone structure is the most like One's, except for in the hands—his hands are a smaller version of Three's, but absolutely there. There's a sudden quirk to his mouth and a short little laugh that's just got to be Four—it wouldn't fit on anyhim else.

Two...a kindly eccentric. He took that part of Two easily, but the only biological proofs that Two ever existed is in the eyes.

Humans joked about gingers and blondes. Martians had proverbs about the neurotic leadership-qualities in their five-fingered selves. Daleks had encyclopedias of language about anything that wasn't Dalek (and it all meant "destroy"), and Cybermen were paranoid about upgrades and deletion.

Gallifreyans worried about Lungbarrow Eyes. They tended to show up as an attribute of controversial and mad characters in sensationalist fiction.

And, ever since Two, the Doctor has always had the luminous, bright Lungbarrow Eyes.

Sometimes Five wonders if this is a secondary genetic marker, some sort of way to warn the other Time Lords what to expect when they deal with him. Like the bright colors on a poisonous Earth creature.

On Earth, poisonous things are usually the brightest. It's an evolutionary act of manners that really, other planets would do well to adopt. Gallifrey doesn't have that color conditioning and that's a shame. They usually pay more attention to smell but that often backfired. Most meat-eating species and not a few insectoids think Gallifreyans smell very delicious, and some of them would like to see if the flavor of the package stands up to the olfactory teasing (Androgums, ugh).

Tegan teases him for being "sweet as honey," always reminding him that Terrans have two sides to that comment, the other which implying that sweetness is not always to be trusted. He grumbles and scoffs and mutters and whatnots, but he's secretly pleased. She's much brighter than she believes, and that makes it easy to shoot her down but she seems to know there's more to his cuts than meets the eye.

Meets the eye... He stares at his eyes. They're brown again, but the glow of different colors are hiding beneath.

Five shakes his head at himself. He's a bit of a mess when you think of it. He'd like to be as smooth and cool on the inside as he is on the out, but he's just too much a product of his own past.

It took meeting three of his other selves to actually see what was happening.

Five is glad his Companions are asleep right now. He needs to be alone with his thoughts. He doesn't want anyone but the TARDIS to see him shaking at old memories and the fresh horrors from Gallifrey. What a debacle. Borusa...oh, that Borusa! Five wants to pity him, desperately so! His grand schemes were all dust in the end, a madman and a fool!

But he can't pity him for long. Memories are too painful. In every Life he's been, he's always suffered the tyranny of fools, especially the greatest fools of all: his own people. They've battered his mind, scorched his sense of being, and violated him in ways too intimate for language.

They've kept him from being HIM.

And Borusa had put a new twist on it all, cut pieces of himself away from himself, making him sick and unwhole.

Five remembers fighting Borusa with everything he had, but that everything was sadly lacking. He was missing his past selves; they were separated, split apart and forced to other parts of this loathsome task.

Oh, I will not serve you!

You have no choice, Doctor - I wear the coronet of Rassilon...It emphasizes my will and allows me to control the minds of others.

(((Bow down before me, Doctor.)))

And he did.

"Doctor! Come join us! We need you!"

The little fellow saw what was happening first, the sickening recognition in his eyes clouding his face. The Doctor didn't even know who the three men were before his eyes. Borusa's lock had been far too strong, his mind accumulated with many, many incarnations of training and ambition, fed with Rassilon's Coronet to unnatural levels of psychic power.

"He can't...it's some kind of mind lock!" The elderly man with the cane had exclaimed, before turning to their other selves. "Concentrate! We must be one!"

They had managed, barely. Three had been a frozen statue the whole time but he had the collected experiences of the others and, controlled as an Akido strike, he cut the legs out from Borusa's Lock.

Together his three selves pulled him to their side.

His mind cleared the closer he came to them, and he began to recognize the himselves lost. The great icebergs had re-formed and re-joined the glacier of his being.

Strange...

Incarnations weren't usually friendly with each other, but he'd felt nothing but tenderness to him.

He turned, Three and One flanking his sides. Three was the biggest and a solid wall waiting a command, ready to protect his youngest self. Two stayed where he was in the back, One was turned to watch Borusa as easily as Five, and Five stared at that withered-up, horrid joke of a Lord President.

"You see, Borusa? Together we're a match for you."

And in a moment of Time compressed, an entire conversation between himselves flickered like a firestorm.

* One's mind threw up a muffler to deaden any of Borusa's continued mental attacks and held it-

* Two's Mind crackled with pent-up energy...angry, angry energy, coiling up like a Gallifreyan Cobra. His rage was a pure core, contained in a small vessel too tightly for anyone to sense it outside of close range. The Doctor felt a temporal echo move forward from Two, interlocking with Three's Timeself, and-

* -Three tossed up his own additions to their first self's mind-wall, splitting a portion of himself to extending his awareness.

((Careful, lad!)) Two's mental voice warned from behind him. ((If he knows how to mind-lash, get out of the way. I'm ready.))

((Do as he says,)) Three agreed, lightning swift. (( He remembers Me from my Trial. He'll not expect our Second Self to actually fight him!))

((Hmph. I've danced rings around Ice Warriors that thought faster than him.))

((That's because one of us is a natural at playing the Fool.))

((Oh, so you admit you messed up when you said you felt something was wrong out loud where anyone could hear us?))

((HE'S ABOUT TO SPEAK! BE READY!)) One hissed, for Borusa was opening his mouth to announce the next level of the Game.

And Time decompressed; the conversation ended, but but the waiting remained. Five was too battered to completely remember what a mind-lash was; it was something in his forgotten past, but he knew it was very bad and that Two was about to throw himself into the middle of something awful to spare him.

Just as frightening was the fact that his other selves were going to let him do it.

"Perhaps," Borusa was conceding, unaware of the four-way communications humming on the other side of One and Three's shield. "But you will never overcome me."

We don't need to. Soon, Chancellor Flavia will be here with her guards - or can you overcome the whole high council? 

Why not? I am Lord President of Gallifrey and you are the notorious renegades. We shall see who is believed."

((You'd think one madman would think of something new to call us after all these years,)) Two mentally sniffed his derision, and Five felt a flash of amused warmth from Three.

But Borusa meant it. It was a nightmarish repeat of his announcement in the Throne Room, seconds before he had overwhelmed the Doctor's already battered mind.

And then Rassilon stepped in, and the entire situation was rendered dust.

The Doctor tilted his head backwards, his mouth twisting in a funny little way to one side. In some ways he liked remembering meeting most of his selves, but in other ways he didn't.

Since they'd played Rassilon's Game, his memories had improved. He remembered things he should have never forgotten. He remembered why Earth was so important to him personally, and why of all the portions of Earth he preferred to be close to London—the city of Susan's new life.

He didn't actually go to Earth more than one out of every seven or eight trips, but he could if he wanted to. It was comforting to have this. Even in his exile as Three, he was never far from what would be Susan's home. He protected it, making sure there would be something for her when his First Self journeyed to the ruins after 2164.

Of late, Five is starting to feel a little...odd about those memories.

He seems to remember doing something very urgent in London, involving Two and Three. Three doing something that involved Susan.

Well, if he would do what he would do in his shoes, he'd be squirreling up things London would need for the future. If they couldn't completely salve the Dalek Invasion, they'd need defenses, wouldn't they?

And they'd need supplies.

Depots...resources...

Knowledge.

He might be the most impertinent of himselves, but he knew how to stack a deck in his favor.

((Got to be careful, you know. Never let them see what you're really thinking. You're safer if they have to guess.))

That was Two talking, through and through. Sometimes he wondered how he could have had the energy to be such an outward buffoon and a clown, sloppy on the outside to cultivate the contempt of enemies and potential allies.

That style was for much younger, bouncier, less mature Time Lords, and that wasn't for him anymore, and thank goodness!

Well.

Perhaps just a little bit of Two's mischief was still in him...

"You mean you're deliberately choosing to go on the run from your own people in a rackety old TARDIS?"

"Why not? After all, that's how it all started!"

"One day, we shall be back..." He'd said that to Barb and Ian at the time, and at the time he had meant it. At that time...he had been worth reconciliation.

But he stopped being that man long ago.

Travel had changed him forever. His homesick longing for his planet and his people was not as strong as the truth. He couldn't return to Gallifrey unless they could accept him on his own terms, and even though he accepted every single one of them, the courtesy was not returned.

Gallifrey would kill him now. He couldn't go home to die.

Five blinked in a moment's shock as for the first time in centuries a completely new thought came to him. Someone had known, hadn't they? They had exiled him and stripped him of his knowledge of Time Travel, but they hadn't confined him to Gallifrey where he'd be even more miserable...

Or had they?

The Doctor scowled, his mild face wrenched in a growing unsettlement. What was he trying to remember? Now where did that thought run off to?

Said thought, dangling on its preposition, scampered merrily on its way and he chased it hard as he could in the corridors of his mind. The thought was slippery and agile and dodged-

((When I say run, RUN!))

The Doctor gasped slightly, for the Thought had turned on him, snapping out with a terrific volume of energy. He'd stepped backwards on reflex and the thought had taken its moment and fled.

Well!

The Doctor pressed his hand to his chest, feeling his hearts settle. "That was rather rude of me!" He muttered, still surprised. "Why would I create a time-sensitive memory-lock for my own mind?"

An excellent question, but the him who would best answer that question was not easily reached. Two was the least tangible of his memories...

...Hmn.

If he did remember events correctly, Two was the most approachable in the overlapping hours of his regenerations. That was a vulnerable time for all Time Lords; they often picked and chose extraneous portions of their new personality for the future, and most of their decisions were on instinct and foreshadowing. Time Lord prescience was rarely as sharp as it was in that soft, vulnerable moment of being. Not that his regeneration had been all that pleasant—he must have been half out of his lobes to confuse Adric with the Brigadier! But yes... The Doctor leaned forward in his chair, tapping his long fingers on his knees. He had the urge to go find a cricket bat and hit a ball around until he felt better.

((I was the first, you know.))

The Doctor's fingers slid off his knees as he jumped from the shock. "The first what?" He whispered, but the memory was already fading. He'd almost opened the memory-lock, but not quite. The time and circumstance wasn't ripe. Yet.

Bother, but he could be very annoying to himself.

The Doctor breathed deep for a minute, dredging up some of the more useful meditation exercises to come out of Tibet, and got to his feet. Enough of this shilly-shallying. It was time he went and did something. The TARDIS was always in need of supplies and he had plenty of currency. Why not go someplace quiet for a bit and just have a little rest, build up on repairs and equipment? He could at least figure out how to get the rosemary smell out of the food machine...and more celery for analysis. One of these days the Time Lords ought to put their over-valued brains to work and figure out why celery on Earth was so much better than the limpid stuff in the Gallifrey Hydroponics. He popped over to the console and smoothed its top with his fingers. "Where to go..." he murmured. "Where to go, old Girl..." Some place not new...how about a place he hadn't seen in a few generations? That would do it. Something old and something new... And to help the process... The Doctor grinned and pulled out his handy flipping coin. "Heads or tails?" He asked out loud, and with a snap of his thumb, spun it into the air.


End file.
